Probing the depth of infants’ theory of mind: disunity in performance across paradigms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is currently a hot debate in the literature regarding whether or not infants have a true theory of mind (ToM) understanding. According to the mentalistic view, infants possess the same false belief understanding that older children have but their competence is masked by task demands. On the other hand, others have proposed that preverbal infants are incapable of mental state attribution and simply respond to superficial features of the events in spontaneous-responses tasks. In the current study, we aimed to clarify the nature of infants' performance in tasks designed to assess implicit theory of mind (ToM) by adopting a within-subject design that involved testing 18-month-old infants on two batteries of tasks measuring the same four ToM constructs (intention, desire, true belief, and false belief). One battery included tasks based on the violation-of- expectation (VOE) procedure, whereas the other set of tasks was based on the interactive, helping procedure. Replication of the original findings varied across tasks, due to methodological changes and the use of a within-subject design. Convergent validity was examined by comparing performance on VOE and interactive tasks that are considered to be measures of the same theory of mind concept. The results revealed no significant relations between performance on the pairs of tasks for any of the four ToM constructs measured. This pattern of results is discussed in terms of current conflicting accounts of infants' performance on implicit ToM tasks. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U3vqfe_zdhA&feature=youtu.be.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.017 | 0.077 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".